Thursday, October 29, 2015

This is the call for participation in the FOSDEM 2016 devroom on Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools, to be held on Saturday 30 January 2016 in Brussels, Belgium. We are looking for contributions under the form of talks covering the following main topics:

Any other EDA tools such as high-level tools for digital hardware design (e.g. Migen)

Inter-project opportunities for collaboration

We hope to provide an opportunity for attendees to bring themselves up to date on the latest FOSS EDA developments, share knowledge and identify opportunities to collaborate on development tasks. Have a look at last year's event for a taste of what the EDA devroom is about.

If you already have a Pentabarf account (for example as a result of having submitted a proposal in the past), make sure you use it to log in and submit your proposal. Do not create a new account if you already have one. Please provide a bit of information about yourself under Person -> Description -> Abstract. When you submit your proposal (creating an "Event" in Pentabarf), make sure you choose the "EDA devroom" in the track drop-down menu. Otherwise your proposal might go unnoticed. Fill in at least a title and abstract for the proposed talk and a suggested duration. Bear in mind that a lot of the value in these meetings comes from the discussions, so please be reasonable regarding the duration of the talk.

Abstract: Thermoelectric devices have a wide variety of potential applications including as coolers, temperature regulators, power generators, and energy harvesters. During the past decade or so, new thermoelectric materials have been an active area of research. As a result, several new high figure of merit (zT) materials have been identified, but practical devices using these new materials have not yet been reported. A physics-based compact model could be used to simulate a thermoelectric devices within a full system using SPICE-compatible circuit simulators. If such a model accepts measured or simulated material parameters, it would be useful in exploring the system level applications of new materials. In this thesis, the ground work for such a compact model is developed and tested. I begin with a discussion of thermoelectric transport theory within the Landauer formalism. The Landauer formalism is used as the basis of the tool LanTraP, which uses full band descriptions to calculate the distribution of modes and thermoelectric transport parameters, which can serve as the input to a compact model. Next, an equivalent circuit model is presented, explained, and tested using a simple Bi2Te 3 thermoelectric leg. The equivalent circuit is shown to perform well under a variety of DC, transient, and AC small signal operating conditions. With the equivalent circuit it is easy to determine the maximum cold side temperature drop, the maximum cold side heat absorbed, the temperature profile within the leg, the temperature response to a pulsed current, and impedance over a range of frequencies. Finally, Sentaurus®, a computer program that solves the thermoelectric transport equations numerically, is used to compare and benchmark some of the results of the equivalent circuit when considering Si as the thermoelectric material. The equivalent circuit and Sentaurus® simulations produce similar results in DC and transient cases, but in the AC small signal case the two simulations produce slight differences. The results of this work establishes a baseline compact model for thermoelectric devices whose accuracy and capabilities can be extended.

Together with the MOS-AK Workshop Scientific Program Coordinators Larry Nagel and Andrei Vladimirescu, as well as Extended MOS-AK TPC Committee, we have pleasure to invite to the MOS-AK Workshop which will be held in Washington DC in the IEDM / CMC meetings timeframe Planned MOS-AK workshop is organized with aims to strengthen a network and discussion forum among experts in the field, enhance open platform for information exchange related to compact/SPICE modeling and Verilog-A standardization, bring people in the compact modeling field together, as well as obtain feedback from technology developers, circuit designers, and CAD/EDA tool developers and vendors.

(any related inquiries can be sent to abstracts@mos-ak.org)Free Online Workshop Registration:

http://www.mos-ak.org/washington_dc_2015/registration.php(any related inquiries can be sent to registration@mos-ak.org)Postworkshop Publications:Selected best MOS-AK technical presentation will be recommended for further publication in a special issue of the International Journal of High Speed Electronics and Systems

Sunday, October 11, 2015

IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) is the world’s preeminent forum for reporting technological breakthroughs in the areas of semiconductor and electronic device technology, design, manufacturing, physics, and modeling. IEDM is the flagship conference for nanometer-scale CMOS transistor technology, advanced memory, displays, sensors, MEMS devices, novel quantum and nano-scale devices and phenomenology, optoelectronics, devices for power and energy harvesting, high-speed devices, as well as process technology and device modeling and simulation. This year IEDM technical program also includes a series of the compact modeling papers:

The compact/SPICE modeling and its Verilog-A standardization will be also discussed at two following engineering events organized by MOS-AK Group and the CMC which are collocated with the IEDM in Washington DC in December, later this year.